Nauman Naqvi
Education
- Ph.D. in Anthropology, Columbia University in the City of New York (May 2008) — Dissertation: Mourning Indo-Muslim Modernity: Moments in Postcolonial Urdu Literary Culture
- B.A. in Philosophy, Reed College, Portland, Oregon (Aug 1987–Dec 1991) — Senior Thesis: Dissolving the Problem of Other Minds: Rethinking Subjectivity with Late Wittgenstein and Early Heidegger
Biography
Dr. Nauman Naqvi is a founding faculty member of Habib University, joining as Assistant Professor in Fall 2011 with the mandate to conceptualize and institute the university’s liberal arts core curriculum, along with its Social Development and Policy department, Communication Studies and Design department, and languages-and-cultures-of-Pakistan offerings. He went on to serve as Acting Dean of the School of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (Fall 2012–Fall 2015) and Dean of AHSS (Fall–Dec 2015), and directed the Habib Liberal Core Curriculum (Fall 2012–Spring 2018) and the Comparative Liberal Studies program (Fall 2017–Fall 2018).
Before Habib, Dr. Naqvi held Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowships at Connecticut College’s Toor Cummings Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts (2009–2011) and Brown University’s Department of Comparative Literature (2007–2009), where he taught on Muslim postcolonial melancholia, the Partition of India in fiction and film, and subaltern studies. He completed his Ph.D. in Anthropology at Columbia University in 2008, with a dissertation on postcolonial Urdu literary culture, following an earlier career as Assistant Editor at Newsline, Karachi (1992–1994), Managing Editor of publications at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Islamabad (1994–1997), and Producer for the BBC World Service’s Urdu section, London (1997–1998).
Dr. Naqvi’s scholarship bridges anthropology, history, literature, and philosophy, with a focus on postcolonial melancholia, Urdu literary modernism, and Muslim intellectual history. He has organized major conferences including Habib’s own Postcolonial Higher Education Conference (2011, 2014) and has given invited lectures at Oxford, McGill, Yale, and Columbia, among others. He also translates prose and poetry between English and Urdu, including a translation of Vali Ashraf Sabuhi’s short story “Sahib-e-alam” published in Words Without Borders (2009).
Selected Publications
- “Acts of Askesis, Scenes of Poiesis: The Dramatic Phenomenology of Another Violence in a Muslim Painter-Poet,” Diacritics: A Review Journal of Criticism and Theory, 40.2 (2012).
- “Profession on the Cusp of Saturn’s House: Weighing the Wager & Wages of the Time of a Postcolonial-Historical Pedagogy,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 16.4 (2014).
- “Civilization,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2nd Edition (Macmillan, 2008).
- “The Nostalgic Subject: A Genealogy of the Critique of Nostalgia,” Working Paper No. 23, Interuniversity Center for Research on Sociology of Law, Information and Legal Institutions in Italy (CIRSDIG).
- “Global Apartheid: On the Historical Superiority of the West,” Herald, March 2017.
- “Maps for Modern Muslims,” Outlook (India), November 2017.
- Editor, Rethinking Security, Rethinking Development, Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Islamabad, 1996.
Selected Lectures
- “Religion and Identity Do Not Exist,” Reset: Dialogues on Civilizations, Venice-Delhi Seminars, October 2016
- “Intizar Husain: Literature and a Sense of Historical Difference,” Intellectual History of Pakistan Workshop, Oxford University, July 2016
- “Acts of Inheritance, Scenes of Mourning: Moments in the Oeuvre of the Pakistani Artist, Sadequain,” Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University, March 2010
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